Phil Reisman: 37th District race flirts with slander

Oct. 20, 2012

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Perhaps the only thing we learned last week from the race in the 37th state Senate District is that it’s apparently OK to call Bob Cohen a “slumlord.”

So you may well expect to hear that word a lot over the next 17 days leading up to Tuesday, Nov. 6.

Cohen owns apartment buildings in some of the toughest neighborhoods in New York City. This makes him an easy target — and the campaign for George Latimer has been steady taking aim with a flamethrower.

Anti-Cohen mailings have accused the Republican candidate of being an indifferent absentee landlord who was “sued by the Guiliani and Bloomberg administrations” after piling up hundreds of building violations and allowing drug deals and other illegal activities to occur on his properties.

Responding to one of the mailings titled, “The Truth About Bob Cohen,” Cohen filed no fewer than five complaints with the nonpartisan Westchester Fair Campaign Practices Committee.

The committee last week rejected four of the complaints — including the slumlord characterization which it said was a “fair campaign practice.”

The explanation was as follows: “Based upon the totality of the information and documentation submitted, the Committee (sic) felt that there is sufficient documentation for the use of the word, ‘slumlord.’ ”

Well, at least no one has accused the man of forcing babies to eat lead-paint chips.

Nor has he been called an arsonist, but like I said there’s still plenty of time before election day. If nothing else, the 37th S.D. race has been a case study on how to walk the fine line of slander.

That both these guys are hellbent on getting a Senate seat in Albany is a marvel in the first place — since history shows that is often the last stop before federal prison.

In any case, the Cohen team answered the slumlord crack with an endorsement from none other than New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the very same mayor who supposedly sued Cohen.

Bloomberg also put out a 60-second radio commercial praising Cohen.

“In the last days of campaigns, politicians do desperate things, and right now you may be hearing a lot of lies and eleventh-hour attacks against Bob Cohen,” Bloomberg says, without detailing what those lies are exactly.

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As a matter of fact, he doesn’t mention Latimer by name. Nor does he say which Senate race he’s talking about in Westchester County.

This could be confusing to many voters who are clueless as to what a state senator is in the first place.

Indeed, a recent poll by the Siena Research Institute showed that more than 40 percent of voters in the 37th S.D. either don’t know or have no opinion of the two candidates, which is truly amazing considering all the expensive campaign crap that’s been jammed into their mailboxes.

I’ll bet 90 percent don’t even know they’re in the 37thS.D., which used to include Ossining, but no more.

Ossining disappeared across the Hudson River in a Houdini-like act of redistricting.

It’s now in Rockland County.

Anyway, back to Bloomberg. Evidently, he’s not concerned about the slumlord stuff. Then again, if memory serves, he wasn’t all that worried about clearing the snow off the streets in Queens either.

Bloomberg has had his ups and downs in Gotham, public opinion-wise.

But he’ll go down in history as one of the good mayors.

Getting an endorsement from an independent-minded, billionaire, super-star politician who leads the greatest city in the world amounts to a coup for Cohen to say the least. It means something, especially since Bloomie spreads his love across party lines.

Bloomberg once endorsed U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat — and Schumer won. He once endorsed Yonkers Mayor Phil Amicone, a Republican — and Amicone won. He once endorsed state Sen. Nick Spano of Yonkers — and Spano won … and, uh, later went to jail.

Oh, well.

By the way, Latimer got an endorsement from a former New York mayor, Ed Koch.

That has to count for something — though when I ran it by Mike Edelman, a political consultant, he responded with a Yiddish word.

When I asked Edelman what the word meant, he replied, “What does it sound like it means?” Then he laughed uproariously.

It was clear that Edelman believed that Bloomberg’s approval was a lot more valuable than Koch’s, and he’s probably right about that.

But when I called him on Friday, Koch noted that Latimer was one of the legislative “heroes” who signed the ex-mayor’s New York Uprising pledge to oppose gerrymandering.

“He never wavered,” Koch said of Latimer. “So I know he’s a man of honor.”

That reminds me, in his radio endorsement Bloomberg referred to Cohen as a man of “integrity.”

Honor and integrity — now those are two words you won’t often hear in this race.